Thursday, March 09, 2006

Belated Oscar Thoughts

Since I went and made a few pre-Oscar predictions on Saturday, you've probably been waiting breathlessly these past few days for a post show wrap-up. If so, please--for your own sake as well as mine--GET A FREAKIN' LIFE FOR THE LUVVA GOD!!! I haven't written anything on the awards because there has been plenty written about it by other people and I really don't have any fresh or original insights to add. Now, isn't it refreshing for a media pundit to actually admit something like that? Yeah, you'd never hear anyone on The McLaughlin Group admitting they had nothing relevant to say, even though most of the time they just don't.
Besides, I didn't watch the show. Well, actually, I started to, but fell asleep after the first hour. I'd been up 'til after two in the morning playing poker and just couldn't keep my eyes open.
It does appear that the "trend" I spoke of on Saturday held up. I went to sleep before the show was over and the awards for Best Picture and Best Director were split between two different films. Of course, it wasn't a total surprise, not as if they went totally off the menu to give the honor to Land Before Time 19: Teenage Dinosaur Biker Sluts On Crack. After all, Crash was the film people expected to win if Brokeback Mountain didn't. Despite what I theorized, it's really hard to know if Crash won because the Academy voters honestly thought it was a better movie than Brokeback or because, as I conjectured, they just weren't ready to honor a "gay cowboy movie."
John Stewart seemed a little less sure of himself in his monlogue than he usually does on The Daily Show, but still had some good lines. My favorites were when he greeted the crowd with "Ladies, Gentlemen, Felicity," referring to Felicity Huffman's role as a transgendered person inTransamerica, and when he conflated a well remembered event from recent Oscar history (Bjork's swan dress) and a story from the news of recent weeks (Dick Cheney's "hunting accident") for a particularly well-crafted punch line. (Wow! Did I overthink that joke or WHAT? I mean, did I really just use the word "conflated?" The question is: Did I use it correctly?)
Dolly Parton's performance--along with an infomercial for a CD collection called Superstars of Country that I'd seen earlier that evening--served as a reminder of how much today's crop of Country "music" artists really, really suck.
And King Kong did win the Visual Effects award. Score one for Giant Apes, baby!!!

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